Online Conversational Japanese Classes via University of Hawaiʻi Outreach College

The University of Hawaiʻi Outreach College offers non-credit low-cost Conversational Japanese Classes via Zoom. The best part about the classes is that it has one hour of conversation practice time with Japanese speakers during the last hour of the class. When the classes were in person, Japanese people in Hawaii were volunteering, but with the move to Zoom we now have mostly volunteers from Japan.

Each term is 10-weeks with three terms a year (fall, spring, summer) and classes are on Saturdays from 9am-11:45am HST. Early bird registration is $25 off the regular tuition price, and even at the regular price tuition comes out to less than $8 an hour.

There are 7 classes/levels to choose from and students can change levels if the one they chose was too easy/advanced for them up until the 3rd week of class. The instructor for the advanced class also does informal oral interviews for students who don’t know what level they should go into. The Elementary classes focus more on speaking instead of reading hiragana/katakana/kanji, but they are introduced. Hiragana/katakana knowledge is highly recommended for the Intermediate levels since the textbook does not have romaji at that level. There is no textbook for the Advanced level, and it’s mostly focused on topics and grammar that comes up in JLPT N1/N2.

Link to the classes are [here](https://www.outreach.hawaii.edu/areas-of-study/language-arts-humanities/)

Full Disclosure: I teach one of the classes and was asked by the other teachers at the last staff meeting to advertise our program online since we are on Zoom for the foreseeable future. We use a different curriculum than University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and are not affiliated with the Japanese program at UHM.